Slashdot Mirror
Blizzard Shuts Down Popular Fan-run 'Pirate' Server For Classic WoW (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Blizzard is threatening legal action against the popular "pirate" servers for World of Warcraft. The Nostalrius servers have been operating for nearly a year, running version 1.12 of the original World of Warcraft as it existed in 2006. Admins say that 800K registered accounts and 150K active players were working through quest progressions reproduced to precisely match the game of a decade ago. Nostalrius' team says its French hosting provider has been issued a formal letter asking it to shut down the servers or face a potential copyright infringement lawsuit as hosting private servers is explicitly against Blizzard's Terms of Use. Blizzard says the rule "isn't an issue because of 'lost' subscription fees from players choosing these illegitimate servers over the real WoW servers -- it simply boils down to the fact that private servers are illegal, and that's that." Nostalrius' servers will be shut down on April 10, but the team says it "will still be publicly providing everything needed in order to setup your own 'Nostalrius' if you are willing to."
So you run a server that is illegally hosting copyrighted and trademarked material, and you expect not to get shutdown?
fuggin ip is there anything it is good for?
[nt]
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You've just made sure 800k people will never play your game again.
And you have just made sure that even more servers pop up, and eventually someone smart will make those servers P2P and you are shit out of luck then.
You go after harmless people enjoying an older version of your game and this is what happens. It is a fruitless effort that will only lead to more harm for your own company.
Congrats again, Blizzard.
Copyright infringement, most likely. It says so in the summary.
If you really want, I could dig through the Blizzard ToU.
The 1st commandment of Capitalism: Thou shalt not piss off people with vastly more money than thyself...
Blizard TOU is Contract and not a law, it is a private agreement between the parties.
Copyright infringement (which is what was claimed) is a law.
"it simply boils down to the fact that private servers are illegal"
Well i give thanks to Human nature for the fact that illegality isn't absolute. I give thanks to the fact that differentiation in political landscape, and the diversity of Human collectives in forms of cultures and nations, enables the fact that what is illegal in one country will not be illegal in another one opposing it.
For once, globalization can suck my ass hair. As far as trade sanctions go, one has to be an utmost idiot to think, or even establish such sanctions, that barring imports of food and material resources can be justified by something of such low common denominator value irrelevant to survival and functioning of society as digital entertainment products.
Copyright infringement generally involves, you know.... copying. They didn't copy, they reverse engineered. Clean room reverse engineering is both common and entirely legal.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I recently started playing an MMO for the first time, and it occurred to me that as soon as a gamer gets addicted to one of these games, that's it for their game purchases.
With regular games, most people will finish a game, then move on. This is not the case with MMOs. That's one reason that a publisher would want to shut down a pirate server that addicts of a discontinued MMO are playing on. Break their fixation on an old game, and someone will be able to sell them new games.
The only law they broke is to reduce the subscribers base for Blizzard online services. That's just cold, man.
They probably host some map/quest/textures/models on their servers that they don't own copyright of
linux client, you greedy bastards...
world of warcraft is on the way out.. bleeding subscribers every day. even after big content updates, after the buzz has faded, numbers are even lower than before the update...
so the real reason, of course, is that the 'pirate' servers are threatening to overtake blizzard's own subscriber levels.
And will the car manufacturers start pulling the same BS to lock out 3rd part repair shops?
On first read (as a non-player of the game) the headline looked like a severe weather event had caused the server to go down (leading to the thought that this might help the game's owners find it if the routes to it were somehow hidden, as with Tor).
Did anybody else have this effect?
It's yet another example of poorly-worded articles that assume the casual reader has deep background knowledge of the subject. I consider this to be an annoying property of Slashdot. It's not fatal.
But it would be nice if posters recognized that not everybody on /. is as deeply immersed in the subject as they are - and that the not-so-clued-in faction includes many who might be interested and perhaps have something to contribute.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Copyright is what allows Blizzard to own said property, the ToU is the conditions for using their property, violating the ToU, means you are now violating the copyright.
Learn to spell.
Blizzard Shuts Down Popular Fan-run 'Pirate' Server For Classic WoW
I honestly thought it had been done in by freak weather conditions.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Players: "Why?"
Blizzard: "Because FUCK YOU that's why"
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Calling Nostalrius a pirate server is not accurate. Nostalrius is a reverse engineered server that works with the official Blizzard WoW 1.12 client. I've played on Nost for the past year, and the overwhelming majority of players I've played with paid for retail vanilla WoW subscriptions back in the day. Sure, I can't find my original discs and had to download a copy of the 1.12 client, but I still contend that I have both a legal and moral license to still use that client.
If Blizzard were to offer a vanilla subscription, I would gladly sign up. (Well, maybe before they C&D'd Nost.) However, since they don't offer such a subscription, running a private server should be allowed as an exemption to the DMCA. The EFF previously petitioned the Library of Congress to add an exemption to the DMCA to allow users to reverse engineer server-side controls once games have been abandoned. The Library of Congress granted the exemption for simple matters like server-side authentication methods, but it was limited to allowing local, single-player gaming to continue. It does not apply for MMORPGs that require server-side interaction. However, this ignores the possibility of using a paid-for client with a reverse-engineered server, something I feel should be legal.
Absolutely right, it's not copyright, but it's not clean room either. The big problem in making a WoW server is, in fact, the landscape. How do you know where the ground is? Well, the way these clone builders do it is to scrape the terrain from the WoW client that they're targeting. Oops that's reverse engineering and definitely not clean room. Lawsuit time. Now, if they were to build a terrain by user trial and error, ie, run everywhere and mark terrain by what looks right, that would be another matter. Given the vast number of players out there who seem to want to play these old games, it should be possible to rig some kind of reporting application to crowd-source the problem, but nobody has done it yet.
Which really wouldn't make too much sense. Most of the subscribers of WoW have been there for years. They already played vanilla in many cases. There may be new people who just wanted to experience WoW as it used to be, but if they have the client, they bought the game or got the client somewhere. And they will probably want to move on to new content when they are done with vanilla. There's only so many Molten Core runs you can make, after all.
I'd think this would attract (a) people who did have a subscription in the past but wanted to play vanilla again, (b) people who never played WoW and wanted in for free or (c) someone who is just friends with (a) or (b) and wouldn't be playing WoW by themselves.
In the case of (a), Blizzard already has their money, they really haven't lost anything except perhaps a few more bucks stringing along a junkie who longs for the days of the Barrens chat and the Scarlet Monastery.
For (b), these are people who might actually sign up for a WoW subscription as soon as they play Vanilla and are done with it and want more content. Now, I haven't played in years, but is my assumption Outland and Northrend are probably a ghost town right now. Nevertheless, I can't believe these reverse engineered servers would actually have such a high pop that it would be much different in terms of play. And they would eventually hit Level 95,000,000 or whatever the level cap is now.
And for (c), they were never getting their money without their friend anyway so what's the deal?
It seems odd for them to consider this an actual threat to their subscriber base. It may well be that they are telling the truth and they're doing this simply because it is theirs and they are just that big of a set of dicks.
The servers don't run Blizzard software, they built their own.
Blizzard does not care about private servers for an old game. They care about the 800k users which are not paying to play on their network.
It its the same logic used by Hollywood to attack piracy, really. It doesn't matter if those users would never have a Blizzard account; in their eyes, there's a chance they would.
So which laws are they breaking?
It's been tried, and will probably be tried again.
Actually, the move towards computerized everything in cars means dealers have to do significant amounts of repair that small shops can't afford. And software is DMCA
Did they also modify the client to connect to these servers? If so, then there's your copyright infringement there. If not, then reverse engineering a service seems legit. I can certainly understand why Activision-Blizzard lawyers would get all frothy at the thought of this, but it seems like there's precedent for this sort of thing.
Granted, whether or not your or I think it's legally okay to do this doesn't mean that suits won't be filed, and Activision has a hell of a lot more money to spend on lawyers. Also... they can shut down external operations because they're against the "terms of use"? So Blizzard can simply write their own laws now? Hell, maybe so.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Copyright infringement generally involves, you know.... copying. They didn't copy, they reverse engineered. Clean room reverse engineering is both common and entirely legal.
I don't know if they did, in fact, utilize clean-room engineering, not knowing their product or Blizzard's.
But if they were simply running a server for an MMO, they might not have a problem.
They're running one for the game WOW. Going to be very hard not to use Blizzard's assets with that, and it turns out that usage of those assets is covered under their ToU.
Retail Bliz WoW has sucked like hell for many years.
Classic WoW was *incredible* and Bliz destroyed it with a series of appalling decisions, over the course of many years.
It now *stinks*. It is APPALLING.
There's no way in hell I would ever, ever, under any circumstances WHATSOEVER subscribe to that game, because it's SO AWFUL.
I would if Bliz offered a classic server - but they refuse to do so. They have been asked, a lot, repeatedly, and the answer is no.
Bliz are not loosing any money from me, and they will not provide the service which Nost has provided, and now they're shutting down Nost.
Bliz, your decision here is exactly in line with the long running series of appalling decisions you've made with gameplay in WoW.
I expect trademark law is a better basis. It's easier to violate trademarks, and they can retreat behind the requirement that trademarks be defended or you lose them (unlike copyrights).
But terms of service are, indeed, a contract, and enforceable under the law.
Settings qualify for copyright, too, as do characters under some circumstances.
Bliz refuse to offer a vanilla server - they've been asked.
The people playing here all hate retail (and with good reason - it stinks).
So why don't Bliz simply tell Nost to require a 20 USD/month fee, which they pass on to Bliz.
Answer of course is because Bliz are a large corporation and as such are totally removed from their customers, have no idea what people want, no ability to be considerate, flexible or innovative and have a strong tendancy to use legal threats.
My understanding is that Blizzard would say the server operators are inducing the users (the people playing the game: the clients) to commit copyright infringement.
The Blizzard case way back was fascinating, and they won in court. That was the case where Blizzard essentially claimed they have never, ever sold a game. Not a single copy. "Title was not transferred" is how they put it, because the EULA was magically invoked and retroactively made the sale not have happened.
You probably didn't follow the preceding sentence, because IT'S FUCKING INSANE so go read up. But anyway, from there, it goes like this:
If a user connects to a non-Blizzard server, then the user is violating the EULA. If the user is violating the EULA, then they aren't authorized to possess a copy. If they aren't authorized to possess a copy, then they violated copyright when they installed the software.
MPAA never did anything so evil. Please, people, don't ever pay Blizzard for anything, and if you ever meet an employee of that company, kick them in shin. There are thousands of other game makers.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Nope - WoW doesn't work that way. All the content is on the client, distributed by Blizzard.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
for not shutting down UOX servers.
Same thing. When the FBI is used to defend copyright, it's the same goddam thing. So stop pretending it isn't.
If so, then they can run their own servers all they want, but as of now, the servers won't do anything without the Blizzard client.
Which they do not have the rights to such usage.
Is why I tend to not pay for games. The bullshit entitled attitude that "you pay us to 'own' a copy of our game but we still own it and we'll decide how you can use it" rubs me completely the wrong way. More than the shitty short-if-they-exist-at-all campaigns that games have now, more than forcing us to pay for shitty DLC some of which is released concurrently with the game, more than the bug filled shit shows that seem to be getting released on all platforms now, and more than the "you'll log in to our worthless service at all times or we won't even let you load up the game" shit that they're all trying to pull now.
Signing the petition auto-cretes an account where the default settings are for change.org to spam you as they see fit, the tossers.
Time to move it to somewhere Blizzard can't sue.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Violating ToU != violating copyright.
The person(s) running the servers don't need the client. The players use the client to connect. The only actual legal footing Blizzard could have here would be against users, and only if their EULA stated that users may not direct the client at unofficial servers. There is no such clause in the EULA. Blizzard has no legal grounds to demand the shutdown of this service. This all boils down to the host and the host's customer not having the balls (money) to stand up to the douchebags at Blizzard.
"It simply boils down to private servers being illegal" is a lie and a cowardly cop-out. No, private servers are not "illegal". They may be forbidden by Blizzard, but there is no law that says Blizzard cannot allow or tolerate them.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I poked around setting up a private server a few years ago for my own use, and everything such as NPC location, models, specific skills, dialog, quests, quest text, any quest-scripting, player skills, skill handling, monster spawn areas, boss location and scripting, etc was all server-side. The raw content - images, textures, models, etc may be all client-side but at least as of the time I was messing with it (which I'll admit was several years ago) the server was responsible for the glue keeping it all together and making it a game. Otherwise you're just wandering around in a dead world. There were several databases available - those that tried to make it as much blizz-like as possible (advertised as such) plus various remixes and versions that usually played with superpowering everything.
I could see them going after them for copyright if they've directly copied the quest texts and NPC dialog and such.
linux client, you greedy bastards...
There was one internally. Would have been a loss to maintain, distribute and support. Helpful for debugging, bugs manifest different with a different OS/compiler. But the Mac client largely covers that. And the Wine team works to make sure WoW runs, so a native client would be somewhat redundant.
I'm not a lawyer but I believe there is a thing called tortious interference with a contract (or something like that). It basically involves a 3rd party encouraging other people to violate a contract. The 3rd party can be liable for doing so.
"Tortious interference, also known as intentional interference with contractual relations, in the common law of torts, occurs when a person intentionally damages the plaintiff's contractual or other business relationships. This tort is broadly divided into two categories, one specific to contractual relationships (irrespective of whether they involve business), and the other specific to business relationships or activities (irrespective of whether they involve a contract). There is also a tort of negligent such interference."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Seems the server folks are intentionally interfering with contracts between WoW client software licensees (gamers) and the owner of the WoW client software (Blizzard).
Which really wouldn't make too much sense. Most of the subscribers of WoW have been there for years. They already played vanilla in many cases. There may be new people who just wanted to experience WoW as it used to be, but if they have the client, they bought the game or got the client somewhere. And they will probably want to move on to new content when they are done with vanilla. There's only so many Molten Core runs you can make, after all.
There's a further benefit as well -- it takes some of the rosiness off of those rose-tinted glasses that many oldtimers (myself included) use when talking about Vanilla. I've played on the Vanilla servers recently and it was kindof fun, but I realized quickly... the game really has improved since Vanilla. There are a lot of things that work a lot better, the combat is better paced, it gets boring walking slowly over lands with no actual content, and there is a lot of syntactic sugar that just makes the game "feel" better. Running around as a warrior at level 10 with heroic strike being my ONLY damaging special ability, and having to auto-attack for 10 seconds to get the rage to use it just once, then rinse and repeat... yeah, that's kindof boring!
The users modifies a plain-text file (realmlist.wtf).
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Is Blizzard claiming they own 'Nostalrius'? If not, fuck off. IANAL but in most countries one is free to choose a service provider, it doesn't matter that Blizzard owns the Client. Imagine if Windows computers could refuse to visit www.apple.com and play.google.com?
Why can Blizzard maintain a 16 year-old game but not a 10 year-old game? 'Nostalrius' servers shows there is a demand for their product which can be monetized. Even having old software in use should be a good thing for the developer: I doubt Blizzard is complaining people still play their 20 year-old 'Starcraft' game?
Sorry Blizzard, but you are not a government entity, you do not get to write laws or get to say what is and what isn't illegal.
If fans develop their own servers to run an older version of the product, that's their business as you're no longer actively developing that old version. It's abandonware as you've gone to newer versions, basically changing the game so that it no longer bears any resemblance to the 2006 version of the game.
If those fans were making money off of it, that would be one thing, but to claim that they can't play the version they love? Fuck that and fuck you.
It would be like the makers of D&D sending cease and desist letters to everyone playing by third edition rulesets because the 5th edition ruleset is now available.
You need to read again:
The license granted to you in Section 1 is subject to the limitations set forth in Sections 1 and 2 (collectively, the “License Limitations”). Any use of the Service or the Game Client in violation of the License Limitations will be regarded as an infringement of Blizzard’s copyrights in and to the Game. You agree that you will not, under any circumstances:
F. facilitate, create or maintain any unauthorized connection to the Game or the Service, including without limitation (a) any connection to any unauthorized server that emulates, or attempts to emulate, the Service; and (b) any connection using programs or tools not expressly approved by Blizzard;
There is such a clause, and you missed it.
And regardless of any agreements that the server operators may or may not have made, they don't have the rights to the Blizzard Client.
1st Commandment of Capitalism Rebellion: If you or people you like have been screwed over by capitalism and have bugger all, pissing people off who have vastly more than you by taking steps to ensure they end up with less, is OK, as long as costs them far more than it costs you ie you might have to spend thousands but as long as it costs them billions, that's cool (consider it capital redistribution). So how much did the Panama papers person spend in order to cost others billions.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
"On first read (as a non-player of the game) the headline looked like a severe weather event had caused the server to go down (leading to the thought that this might help the game's owners find it if the routes to it were somehow hidden, as with Tor)."
Well... I'll just leave this here:
https://weather.torproject.org...
"Tor Weather
As of April 4, 2016, Tor Weather has been discontinued.
Tor Weather provided an email notification service to any user who wanted to monitor the status of a Tor node. Upon subscribing, they could specify what types of alerts they would like to receive. The main purpose of Tor Weather was to notify node operators via email if their node was down for longer than a specified period, but other notification types were available, including one where operators would be informed when their node was around long enough to qualify for a t-shirt.
The main reason for discontinuing Tor Weather is the fact that software requires maintenance, and Tor Weather is no exception. Tor Weather was promising t-shirts for relays that have not been around long enough or that provided too little bandwidth to be useful to the network, and it was almost impossible to deny a t-shirt after Tor Weather has promised it. Apart from that, Tor Weather was likely not offering t-shirts to people who have long earned it, thereby confusing them. An unreliable notification system is worse than not having a system at all. Relay operators shouldn't rely on Tor Weather to notify them when their relay fails. They should rather set up their own system instead.
We have tried to find a new maintainer for Tor Weather for years, but without success. We started rewriting Tor Weather using Onionoo as data back-end in 2014, and even though that project didn't produce working code, somebody could pick up this efforts and finish the rewrite. The Roster developers said that they're planning to include an email notification function in Roster. And we developed a simple Python script that provides information about a relay operator's eligibility for acquiring a t-shirt. None of these alternatives is a full replacement of Weather, though.
We encourage the community of Tor relay operators to step up to start their own notification systems and to share designs and code. Tor Weather is still a good idea, it just needs somebody to implement it.
Tor Weather is discontinued in two steps. For now, new subscriptions are disabled, new welcome messages are not sent out anymore, and existing subscriptions continue working until June 30, 2016. From July 1, 2016 on, Tor Weather will not be sending out any emails.
Sorry for any inconvenience caused by this."
over the skin-suit wearing Activision business Nazis. I didn't even know this was still a thing. I heard of pirate servers years ago and I thought they were all sued in to oblivion then.
If they hand over the server to Blizzard it will put them in a bit of a PR spot, and they won't easily be able to shut the service down as their will be an outcry. (150K active user base) - and as we all know Bli$ard has been creaming it for years, its about time they put something back.
I seriously doubt that the people currently hosting the service are making any money so from a financial point of view it will be a non issue.
John Deere is already doing it. Cars can't be far behind.
Maybe blizzard should take a hint and run classic servers too? Clearly there is demand for them...
Blizzard did not handle this very well even compared to other gaming companies, while they could have either ignored it like Ultima Online or made an old school server like Runescape.
And will the car manufacturers start pulling the same BS to lock out 3rd part repair shops?
Or better yet, start locking out 3rd party petrol, or 3rd party battery chargers.."i'm sorry sir, you dont own your model s, because when you used a 3rd party charging station, you violated the eula under which terms your license to possess the model s is now recinded to be effected immediately by remote deactivation ... oh dont be silly sir, the fact that YOU thought there was a sale is irrelevant..nobody can own things anymore ho ho"
So what they're saying is: "It's not about the money, we just like being dicks"
And US courts has upheld this several times. However, France is not yet US jurisdiction, and under EU law, a sale is a sale. It cannot be undone via a EULA (aka. a "contract after the fact", which is automatically invalid). The only case an EULA is valid is when it's accepted before the money changes hands, which is pretty much limited to downloads and business-to-business transactions. WoW may be download only nowadays, but you used to be able to buy it in regular stores.
Those who bought it in a store bought it. The EULA cannot override the law.
Who did they learn this from? *cough* Microsoft *cough*
Just because a contract says something doesn't make it the law. Just because some fallible officers of the court made some regrettable decisions in the past does not make them moral arbiters. I could have you install software and click through a EULA that says by not killing your own family, you are in violation of the terms of the agreement. No court in the world would agree that it meant anything even if you came and had it signed and notarized in front of five supreme court justices and the vice president of the US.
Do not give in to oppression :P
Good Luck shutting down the Pirate WOW server in Cuba
How much was Blizzard losing off of people playing a version of the game that is no longer for sale? I sincerely hope that all of these players just move onto another hacked server and don't pay a damn cent to Blizzard to get into an official server.
(b) IMO doesn't even apply.
Someone who wants to get into WoW for free will not be looking for a Vanilla server, when there are highly populated WotLK and Cata servers out there (maybe even Pandaria, haven't looked into it for a few years). I suspect that Vanilla servers are still very much behind in terms of accuracy. I've played on WotLK private servers a few years ago (and had played the real deal extensively when it was live) and even with all private servers running on the same patch with the same software/DB and pooling their development resources they were still quite a bit off, even after years of development.
"isn't an issue because of 'lost' subscription fees from players choosing these illegitimate servers over the real WoW servers -- it simply boils down to the fact that private servers are illegal, and that's that."
What a load of trite, cowardly, disingenuous crap!
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
Settings are *purely* functional, and therefore do *not* qualify for copyright.
I checked those thousand other game makers. I played a lot of their games. Then I went back to playing World of Warcraft and Diablo 3. They can stick whatever they want in their EULA and I'm totally fine with that. Lots of other people are too judging from their sales numbers.
But the Internet Freedom Police post more than everyone else so you get topics like this one.
Violating ToU=no longer have a license to use copyrighted materials=violating copyright.
The work of others done is being stolen by Bliz over a right they don't have except by extrajudicial imperative and bribing for the "right" laws to be moved so that it doesn't have to be copyright infringement for it to be blocked.
This was one of the reasons I didn't care when DIII became online only and I refused to bother wondering about getting it any more. And why their actions in patching DII is of little actual value in making me feel they know what they're doing and care about their work and responsibilities.
And it's why I really couldn't give a rats ass about actual for-profit piracy and discard utterly, even if justified by actual harm, any whining about losses from the content industry. Including the assholes whining about adblocking.
Unlike them, I can't get laws passed in my favour.
What I CAN do is ignore the laws and give not a fig for their problems.
The assets are all on the client side.
to protect something you don't even use and get money for?
As a shareholder, you'd still have them for wasting money on this threat. Not to mention that "goodwill" IS a line item on a balance sheet, and this just shit all over it.
It belongs to the owner, and an EULA isn't required to run a product for its intended purpose, even if a copy is required, because it is part of the implied contract: that purchase allows you use of the product, otherwise there's nothing being sold.
An EULA is also not under contract law, since it's not a contract. It claims to be a license, but doesn't actually license anything that isn't already possible, and the restrictions are not license compatible. It cannot be a contract either, since a contract requires at the very least consideration for the one being bound, and no consideration is transferred (again, if it's "you can use the product", then that is already in the implied terms of a purchase).
However, lawyers don't care what the law says, just what they can get away with under what the law says. And the more wealth you have, the more your assertions will win. And under the adversarial system, nobody is allowed to say "That is unjust", because you need standing first.
Which would be creating an unauthorized derived work from the original text file.
It probably passes fair use if you do it yourself to you own copy of a legitimately installed file. However publishing the edited file (like say as part of explaining how to connect to the alternate server) would be a violation. It would be a similar infringement to trying to publish a book that was just "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" but with the Character Dumbledore renamed "Thumbledore".
EULA is valid, when you accept it during installation or opening the package(if it's included). If you don't, you are supposed to be able to get your money back. Of course not all of the shit that's written in the EULA is legally binding even if you accept it. Same goes for games bought online, only it's harder to be able to exercise your rights.
You have a problem with someone else fighting for your rights?
Case law says otherwise.
What? What a horrible comparison.
Totally agree with the parent. But I think there's something that all you techies need to understand (and I don't say that as a slam, just that there is a wide divide here). Lawyers look at this case and see a long, rich tradition of people taking a series of arguably lawful steps to accomplish an unlawful goal. Judges have very little patience for this type of obfuscation; instead, the judge in a case like this is going to ask a couple of fundamental questions:
1) Who owns the intellectual property at issue here?
2) Is the allegedly infringing party doing something that feels like an invasion of the owner's intellectual property?
If the answer is "yes" to both questions, then it just becomes a matter of examining affirmative defense (such as Fair Use) and then developing a legal justification for why the infringing activity should be stopped.
This case seems like a slam dunk to me. Blizzard invested its capital to create a product. Blizzard has the right to profit from that investment. I have little sympathy for parties suggesting that because what they are doing isn't technically "copying" that they aren't trying to recreate the look & feel & enjoyment provided by the product. Listen, I despise the DCMA as much as the next lawyer, but does anyone really think Blizzard isn't entitled to stop people free-loading?
This isn't the first time that Blizz has went server emulation. They shut-down bnetd years ago, which has since been succeeded by PVPGN. I'm not sure what makes PVPGN less of a target than bnetd, as far as I can tell it's an updated fork.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
When they chose to be a dick about it while only discussing half the issue - then yes, I do.
Saying "it's illegal" is a stupid argument when you're the only one trying to make it illegal
The file is one line in length, a couple dozen characters. You're literally changing all except the first 8 or so characters of the file; more is changed than unchanged. That falls under fair use no matter what, in the worst case. It would be similar to trying to publish a book where that was nothing like "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" except for one of the characters being named Dumbledore.
I don't even play WoW; I just did 45 seconds of research before I spoke. Try it next time.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
You.
There are still 'pirate' servers of the discontinued Starwars Galaxies MMO. Unlike the present 'The Old Republic' MMO which is entirely combat and story focused, the old one was totally free form, i.e. you could choose professions and create and trade items without getting into any PvP/PvE.
Now that The Mouse is in charge, expect them to also get shut down like this.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."